iPhone 5 rumor rollup for the week ending Oct. 21

John Cox |
Oct. 24, 2011

The fever of speculation around the Next Apple iPhone rises and ebbs like a great tide, ever restless.

iPhone 5 causing increase in Facebook scams and spams

ITWorld's Dan Tynan explains in his blog post http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/215259/mythical-iphone-5-leads-real-facebook-scams how he received a Facebook message pointing to an allegedly faulty website that was "giving away an iphone5 to persons which are at face book for free…all they ask is your own thoughts and opinions about the I Phone5 and you can keep it permanently." Tynan got a screen capture of the message.

Grammar and other issues aside, that's quite a deal, eh? Clicking on the included link brought you to a website offering to let you test the iPhone 5. And all you have to do is fill in some blank fields with your email address and shipping address.

"At best, sites like this suck down your data via phony giveaways and then sell your info to lead gen companies," Tynan writes. "Given the Russian pedigree (and the nonexistent product it was hawking), though, I'm betting it was a malware infection site. Just a hunch."

Near Field Communications (NFC) on iPhone 5 is doomed by stupid people

Michael Nace, at iPhone5NewBlog, believes that Google Wallet and Visa and Isis and other "NFC payment platforms" have "put digital wallet technology on the map."

But.

"But a lack of consumer knowledge and interest in paying for goods with their smartphone may mean no NFC on the 2012 iPhone 5," he writes.

If only smart people could make the important decisions. "[W]hile avid smartphone enthusiasts are well aware of NFC, average smartphone users are either wary or unaware of the digital wallet concept," Nace writes.

Nace has mastered use of the passive tense to make rumors and speculation seem unimpeachable. "With the advent of Google Wallet, it was assumed that Apple would answer in turn with its own proprietary digital wallet," he writes. And why not, indeed?

Yet.

"Yet, by the end of the WWDC [Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June], the unveiling of iOS 5 and iCloud seemed to have pushed away the strong call from iPhone users for NFC."

A strong call from iPhone users. Yes. We can. Hope and Change. The Hallelujah NFC Chorus sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. To which Apple, incomprehensibly, turned a deaf ear.

Maybe they were listening instead to folks like Laura Chambers, senior director of PayPal Mobile, whom Nace quotes in the story. She "warned during a panel discussion at GigaOM's Mobilize 2011 conference last week that merchants have already been burned by the experience of paying for terminals to support NFC chips on credit cards, and only a miniscule portion of the population is actually using them nationwide."

"It has to be assumed that Cupertino has kept an eye on these developments and, as a result, may see NFC adoption as a minefield," Nace concluded.